My preview card hasn't done anything indecent to the colour pie. What it does is in the colour it's always been in. You might've seen its granddad somewhere before, like on various banned and restricted lists. All right, you jackals, I won't keep you in suspense any longer. But since it's so fun to be a tease during preview weeks, I'm going to make you click for your card.

This is a bit more complicated than it appears, so here's the rules FAQ entry for the card:

* All the Auras return to play simultaneously. Whether an Aura can be attached to a creature is checked before any of them are returned and doesn't take into account any simultaneously returning Auras. For example, if Tattoo Ward (which gives enchanted creature protection from enchantments) and Holy Strength are in your graveyard and there's only one creature in play, both Auras are returned to play attached to that creature, then Holy Strength is put into your graveyard the next time state-based effects are checked.

* Auras don't need to say "enchant creature" to return to play. For example, an Aura with "enchant land" will return to play if there's an animated land for it to enchant.

This means that enchant permanents like Confiscate and Faith's Fetters will only return to play if there are creatures to enchant. Enchant artifact Auras like Stasis Cocoon can return, but only if there are artifact creatures on the board. Auras that normally can't enchant a creature (like Utopia Sprawl and Paradox Haze) don't even leave the graveyard. This won't be relevant too often, but it does make a difference for cards like Femeref Enchantress.

There are a couple things to note. One, because you are just putting the Auras into play, and not playing them, the process doesn't target! You can therefore put the enchantments on creatures that can't be the target of spells or abilities, like my arch-nemesis and favourite punching-bag Giant Solifuge. What this also means is that you don't have decide which Auras are going to go on which creatures until the spell resolves. When you play an enchant creature Aura, your opponent can respond by destroying the creature you've targeted, causing you to lose both the Aura and the creature. With Retether, you can choose to put the Auras on some other creature.

Two, if you have no creatures when this resolves, but your opponent does, you will have to put the Auras on an opponent's creature. So the card has some potential to backfire. You can somewhat get around this by playing with Auras that have targeting restrictions like Spirit Loop, which has “enchant creature you control,” or Wurmweaver Coil, which can only enchant green creatures. There are other safeguards we can put in place, which I'll talk about in a second.

Shocked and Aura-fied

Conventional wisdom suggests that playing with a lot of enchant creature Auras is a bad thing. By doing so, you run the risk of trading two of your cards (your creature and the Aura enchanting it) for a single removal spell from your opponent. Worse, if you can't keep a creature on the board, you run the risk of having more dead cards than the baseball hall of fame. Well, as I hope I've proved over the last year, you can have a lot of fun building and playing decks that are neither conventional nor, I guess, wise.

How can we build and/or play a Retether deck? Here's what I've been thinking:

Step 1: Get a creature into play.

Auras need creatures. The question becomes: Which creatures?

Untargetables. As I said, Retether puts the Auras directly into play, so you can put Auras on Giant Solifuge, Humble Budoka, and Zephid. Being untargetable also prevents your opponent from killing your guy with spot removal in response to Retether. Since you'll often want to play your Auras from your hand, I'd recommend playing with cards like Silhana Ledgewalker and Troll Ascetic (which can be targeted by you, but not by your opponents).

“Penumbras.” You know, like Penumbra Spider, Penumbra Bobcat, Penumbra Wurm. All of these creatures require two removal spells to fully eliminate, one for the original and one for the black token copy. So even if your opponent has a removal spell and destroys your guy, you'll still have a creature in play. I would also put any creature enchanted by Elephant Guide or Griffin Guide into this category.

Creatures with Protection from X. Similar to both of the above, creatures with protection (especially from red and black) are tough for your opponent to remove, either in response to Retether or once you've piled a half-dozen Auras on to a single creature.

Dredge ‘em. This is one of the most popular, easiest, least mana-intensive methods of filling the graveyard. Notably, Golgari Grave-Troll and Stinkweed Imp have been enabling decks based on Ichorid and Patriarch's Bidding, and they would also help to maximize Retether. My favourite Dredge card, Moldervine Cloak, seems like a bit of no-brainer, since it's a powerful creature enhancer that can also be used to dump more Auras into the bin.

Magemarks. This cycle from Guildpact provides you with the most obvious of the Voltron-Assemble Aura combos. I'm sure there are others, probably involving Druid's Call and an arbitrarily large number of squirrels. Requiring a whole bunch of Auras to be in play in order to get your deck to work is not a very reliable game plan, but Retether changes that.

Negative Enchantments. Not all enchant creature Auras are supposed to go on creatures you control. Cards like Wanderlust, Control Magic, and Pacifism have been tormenting opposing creatures for years, and they could work well in a Retether deck. The only potential problem is that there's no guarantee that your opponent is playing with creatures. Of course, that can be remedied by using cards like Hunted Lammasu.

Step 3: Play Retether.

This is pretty straightforward. Add four mana to your mana pool, one of it white, and announce the sucker. You will do this most often during one of your main phases, while the stack is empty, although I have to say that the idea of using Retether as a combat trick (with the aid of Quicken or Vedalken Orrery) makes me chuckle.

Here's another aggro-y deck with a combo-y finish. As with the previous deck, you can just put a Griffin Guide on one of your two-mana guys and start beating down (Boros Swiftblade is pretty good here), using Fire Whip and Galvanic Arc to clear a path. Later in the game, you can sacrifice all of your enchantments to Auratog, Retether them in into play, and send of all that Whip and Arc damage straight to the opponent's head. Flaring Flame-Kin and Thran Golem fit right in as well.

It's not often that white gets a card with a lot of combo potential. I'm not sure how many mono-white decks I've built while writing this column, but early estimates suggest that it is zero. To remedy this unfortunate situation, I've put together a mono-white Retether deck that has the most combolicious finish yet: Stuffy Doll and Guilty Conscience. We've seen it before. It was one of the absurd combos in Mark Gottlieb's Magicthegathering.combos – Time Spiral Edition article. It fits nicely into a Retether deck because there's another enchantment that you'll want to put on a Stuffy Doll: Pariah. In the meantime, while you're setting up one of those combos, you can use Guilty Conscience and Pariah as “creature removal,” beat down with your white weenies and their Griffin Guides, feed Spirit Loops to the Kobayashi of enchantments, Auratog, or just enjoy total immunity to damage with a Pariah'd Voice of All.